REMEMBRANCE DAY - Sunday 8th November 2009

On Sunday November 8th MK Humanists attended the Remembrance Day Ceremony at the War Memorial on Church Green Road, Bletchley, to remember all those who lost their lives in two World Wars and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. We laid our wreath on behalf of Humanists and other people of no religious faith, remembering that many of the war dead had no particular faith to begin with or lost their faith while enduring the horrors of war.

WHY WE WERE THERE: We think that it is important to remember those who gave their lives so that we can live in a free country. We were also there because we would like to see fair representation of Humanists and the non-religious at public occasions, equal to the representation of people of other religions or beliefs.

We share two of the objectives of The Armed Forces Humanist Association -- to make Remembrance a pluralist societal ceremony incorporating those of all religions or beliefs and none, and to conduct positive engagement, not adversarial challenge. Humanism is a ‘religion or belief’ in terms of Article 9 of the Human Rights Act, which makes illegal official discrimination between those with religious and those with nonreligious beliefs under UK law. Persistently excluding Humanists from public occasions is in breach of the legal principle of non-discrimination set out under the Act. It also ignores the considerable contribution that humanists make to society, not least as members of the armed forces. Much national communal activity organised by government and others is still conducted within a religious (and broadly Christian) framework, in spite of the mass of evidence suggesting the irrelevance of religion to the lives of a majority of the population.